Until the press got loose?"

"It's loose all over the world!" cried Dan Anderson. "They've got out.
You can't keep them in. How did Charlie Allen get killed over at
Sumner? Woman in it. When the boys arrested this fellow Garcia over
at the Nogales, what was it all about? A woman. What set the
desperado Arragon on the warpath so the boys had to kill him? That was
a woman, too. What made Bill Hilliard kill Pete Anderson? Woman moved
in within fifty miles of them on the Nogales. Here's Curly; good man
in his profession. Night-wrangler, day-herder, bog-rider, buster,
top-waddy--why, he'd be the old man on the range for his company if
that Kansas family hadn't moved down in here and married him. It's
Paradise Lost, that's what it is. Arizona next, and it's full of
copper mines and railroads. Where shall we go?" The sweat stood full
on his lip now, and a deep line ran across his forehead. "Where shall
we go?" he repeated insistently. "Come!"

In my own bitterness at all this I grew sarcastic with him. "Sit
down," said I. "Why all this foolishness about a college girl with a
shirtwaist and a straw hat?"

"Oh, now," and his forehead puckered up, "don't you be deceived for one
minute, my friend. This wasn't ordinary. No plain woman; no common or
crimping variety. Just a specimen of the great 'North American Girl!"
He took off his hat. "And may God bless her, goin' or comin'!" said he.

This was the most untoward situation ever yet known in the valley of
Heart's Desire. Dan Andersen was proving recreant to our creed. And
yet, what could be done?

Dan Anderson presently made the situation more specific. "May old Jack
Wilson just be damned!" said he. "If he hadn't found that gold
prospect up on the Homestake, we might have lived here forever.
Besides, there's the coal fields yonder on the Patos, no one knows how
big."

Coal! That meant Eastern Capital. I could have guessed the rest
before he told it.

"Oh, of course, we've got to sell our coal mines, and get a lot of
States men in here monkeyin' around. And, of course, it couldn't have
been anybody else but the particular daddy of this particular girl who
had to come pokin' in here to look at the country! He's got money
literally sinful."

"But, man," I cried, "you don't mean to say that the girl's coming,
too?"

He nodded mutely. "They're out," said he, at last. "You can't get
away from 'em. They're all over the world."

Here, indeed